There is still hope for President Jacob Zuma when it comes to the DA’s court case to have the decision to drop corruption charges against him overturned. On Friday, the DA announced that the Constitutional Court had dismissed an application by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) for leave to appeal directly to that court. That was after a full bench of the Pretoria High Court in April overturned the NPA’s […]
Classes at the University of the Witwatersrand are to resume on Monday‚ the university’s senior executive team said in a statement on Sunday. This follows weeks of violent protests by students demanding free education which saw classes being disrupted and cancelled. The protests saw a number of students‚ including student leader Busisiwe Seabe‚ arrested. No serious injuries were reported. The Council of the University of the Witwatersrand agreed that the […]
Krish Naidoo stunned not only members of Parliament, but also his SABC colleagues as he turned on the board he served on for three years, branding it amateurish and dysfunctional and calling for its dissolution on Wednesday. Naidoo also resigned during the heated meeting in Parliament, which was held to look into the goings-on at the public broadcaster. His seven-minute speech sounded the death knell for the SABC board and […]
The battle for free university education is headed for a crisis after government revealed plans to announce a draconian mid-term budget, which will include cutting its numbers of civil servants. Senior government officials told City Press that Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s medium-term budget – to be delivered in two weeks – will put the squeeze on salary budgets across departments, as well as those for goods and services. While students […]
The full scale of the devastation in rural parts of storm-hit Haiti became clear as the death toll soared to nearly 900 three days after Hurricane Matthew levelled huge swaths of the country's south. As Matthew threatened the US coast on Saturday, US President Barack Obama urged Americans to mobilise in support of Haiti, where a million people were in need of assistance after the latest disaster to strike the […]
Three Syrian refugee children have been hit and threatened with a knife by a gang of right-wing youths in eastern Germany, according to police. The boys, aged five, eight and 11, were getting out of a bus in the town of Sebnitz, around 40km east of Dresden, when they came under attack, police said in a statement on Friday. Following the assault, the attackers started chanting right-wing slogans, police said. […]
War-torn Yemen has been hit by a cholera outbreak, the United Nations has warned, saying it poses a further threat to children in the impoverished country. "This outbreak adds to the misery of millions of children in Yemen," Julien Harneis, the representative for the UN's children agency (UNICEF) in the country, said in a statement on Friday. "Children are at a particularly high risk if the current cholera outbreak is […]
Indian troops have fired warning shots and used tear gas as they clashed with thousands of people in Srinagar protesting against the killing of a 12-year-old boy by security forces. Doctors told Al Jazeera that Junaid Ahmad died early on Saturday at a hospital in the main city of the Indian-administered Kashmir, hours after suffering a head injury and pellet wounds. Residents said the boy was sprayed with pellets in […]
Increasing VAT to 20% on all items except basic foods‚ a 10% reduction in government employees’ salaries and diverting “fruitless and wasteful expenditure” by government departments to the Department of Higher Education could assist in funding free education for tertiary students. These are some of the suggestions made by Facebook users today following an invitation by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan on Friday ahead of the Medium Term Budget Policy Statement […]
VOC became the first Muslim radio station in South Africa when a special events license was granted to the station in Ramadan/January 1995. Subsequent temporary broadcast licenses were granted, permitting the station to broadcast for 24 hours.
